Posted
by
BeauHDon Tuesday February 13, 2018 @08:00AM
from the here-we-go-again dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VTDigger: Cable television giant Comcast is suing the Vermont Public Utility Commission over the panel's decision to require the company to expand its network and step up support for community access TV if it wants to continue doing business in Vermont. A key issue is the services Comcast must provide to local community access systems that carry municipal government and school board meetings and other local events. The 26 community access systems have been pushing -- against resistance by Comcast -- for high-definition video, greater ability to operate from remote locations, and inclusion in the interactive program guides that Comcast customers can use to decide what to watch. The PUC -- formerly known as the Public Service Board -- in January issued a new 11-year permit for Comcast to operate in Vermont. In July the panel rejected the company's request to drop some of the conditions attached to the permit.

In a lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Burlington, Comcast argued that the PUC "exceeded its authority under federal and Vermont law" by imposing "numerous conditions on Comcast's continued cable operations in the state that are arbitrary, unprecedented and will ultimately harm local cable subscribers by resulting in millions of dollars in increased cable costs." It said the commission "did so despite overwhelming record evidence that Vermont cable subscribers do not want to incur any additional costs or fees for the kinds of conditions imposed" in the commission's January order.

At first glance, it appears the cable giant Comcast is attempting to bully the State Commission into submission over the trivial viewership generated by covering municipal government and school board meetings.

What's really at stake is the future of both cable providers and small public access channels.

FTA:

With more customers shifting away from cable to internet-based video streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, the cable television industry — and the public access networks it spawned — could fade into history.
It could be that some new economic model might have to be developed if public access networks are to have a secure long-term future. Christopher put it this way: “If cable TV goes away, our existence is uncertain.”

Really what is sounds like to me is that Comcast wants all the advantages of their government granted monopoly and none of the requirements.

It's time to cut government granted monopolies loose. The Comcast deal with real competition in all areas. The don't seem to be able to deal with it in any other area, so now they have chosen the court system.

I am tired of hearing about how great corporatism is when the "free market" is thrown out the window and companies like this go whining to the courts and to their reps when things do not go their way. If they want to champion corporatism let them die from it as well.

Comcast enjoys a virtual monopoly providing internet service in Vermont, thanks to a sweetheart deal with the State that was recently extended by 11 years. [boingboing.net]

It kind of makes you wonder why the State would make such a poor deal?? Outside of Burlington, there is no city with a population greater than 20,000... making it pretty much all last mile service.

Not to defend Comcast by any means, but the market in the State is meager enough that market protections like competition are not present. Perhaps these smaller States could give up a bit of sovereignty and band together to create a market providers could compete for.

It's almost as though the deal that Vermont signed included the requirements that Comcast expand its network, and now they're trying to get out of that requirement but maintain the sweetheart portion of the deal.

Really what is sounds like to me is that Comcast wants all the advantages of their government granted monopoly and none of the requirements.

Yeah... the PUC should say "Fine, we won't require YOU to provide any public access, so we'll just modify the license to forbid you from taking any action against municipalities that provide their own municipal broadband networks."

That doesn't work because:1) Wire/cable access to customer property requires a government approved easement over lots of neighbors' property.2) Wire/cable access is a natural monopoly. You don't want every new would-be ISP stinging wires and cables throughout the area.

The reasonable approach is for every locality to manage its own hardware layer, but most don't have the technical capability, so it would need to be contracted out. Which it is. The problem is the company stringing the wires/cables feels th

It isn’t that hard today if you don’t have the franchise restrictions and legacy service requirements; you can profit with about 20% uptake for aerial fiber and 30% with buried fiber. A lot of rural areas would do well to throw the cable companies out.

What's really at stake is the future of both cable providers and small public access channels.

What's at stake is the future of community-based regulation of cable monopolies. If they win this case..... then that will mean the citizens couldn't impose conditions on renewing the Cable company's exclusivity, which means their monopoly becomes an almost unconditional one that the local government can no longer limit and impose build-out requirements on to protect the public interest and to sure the entir

If cable was the only way to get content, that would be the case. Dish and Directv compete for television subscribers within the State without the massive landline infrastructure, and the phone companies provide internet service competition.

Landline cable's shrinking market share is a poor use case for out of control monopoly.

over the trivial viewership generated by covering municipal government and school board meetings.

There is a trivial compromise, which would be a win-win for everyone:

Stream such events on demand,.

Comcast is right - it's a waste of resources to block out channels for these events with such low viewership. Vermont is right - expanding access to these meetings is in the public interest. It's not 1970 - let people stream the events. This will be more convenient for people, won't waste Comcast's bandwidth, and the only tradeoff is some extra hard drive space being used up.

When you can explain how Galt managed to smelt the ore, forge the steel, clear the land, quarry the gravel, lay the track, design machine and build the train, and build all of the stations with his own two hands without any input from anyone else, I might believe you.

Otherwise, the basic premise of her writing refutes itself.

More directly on topic, perhaps Comcast would prefer to individually negotiate right of way with each and every property owner it's lines cross where the owners are free to say no and f

I wrote this in response to yet another Edgelord aspie libertarian type online a few weeks back:

Atlas Shrugged is a author tract Sci-Fi novel where actual science and laws of nature are handwaved by a bunch of Mary Sues to justify her socio-economic and political axes. A society of just 200 people would be missing the PEOPLE and resources necessary to maintain anything other than say 18th century technology. Building trains and steel requires a lot of technology and a lot of people not just building trains

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Ha! That's even better. I'm seeing that quote for the first time today. Reminds me of all those Cardassian vs. Kardashian memes a la one is a fictional race from Star Trek, the other we WISH were fictional:

I'm sorry I was unaware that Ayn Rand was so awsum that she developed time travel and was a "founding father" in 1787.

Ayn Rand whose real name is Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum by the way, didn't actually live under Communism for very long. Her family fled St. Petersburg for Ukraine which was still under non-communist "White" control, they stayed there till 1921, then returning to St. Petersburg. While there, she attended college, which wasn't allowed to women before the Revolution. Her education of course, be

1. The Vermont Public Utility Commission issue a new 11-year permit for Comcast to operate in Vermont.
2. Vermont sue the Vermont Public Utility Commission, because the terms on offer are unappealing?

Well, surely, if Comcast don't like it, Comcast are entirely free to decline to accept the new permit and step away from offering their services, in order to allow a competitor - who will meet the requirements - take over?

No?

I wonder why the likes of Comcast don't just skip over all this dull and boring intermediate legal wrangle nonsense and just file a case in each state which says, "We demand the right to receive monies and make a profit just from saying we operate in this State."

I mean, they're pretty much there already, right? They just haven't used such a concise form of words...

Our school hosts a local PA for our community. Most of the equipment was installed in the late 80s. Added onto that were a few DVD players, a Cisco switch, and a few DACs. Still broadcasts in the same 4:3 format it always has. We still get DVDs from all the local churches. I imagine changing it up with all new equivalent HD digital broadcasting equipment would cost around $15,000, give-or-take.

Comcast just doesn't want to shell out that kind of money. And since public-access was started by a mandate b

I don't get it. You mean Comcast is supposed to provide AV equipment to institutions? I thought this was about having sufficient data transfer capacity. Which should be absolutely possible and the worst line installations conceivable at this point in time ought to be able to transfer a dozen of HD streams simultaneously.

How about instead, we break up the content and delivery into two different companies and make Comcast compete with itself. We no longer allow bundling "discounts". If Comcast TV has to pay the same rates to Comcast Commodity Delivery Network as the rest of us Internet subscribers, I'd bet we would see more competitive rates. There are those of us that remember the rape rates charged by long distance carriers back in the 80's and 90's so there are precedents for how well it works. I pay less now for calling around the country on my unlimited cell phone service ($25) than I used to pay for just my (extremely) local phone service in 1988 ($32) and that was in dollars worth about 49% of today's. And my land line costed less than $7 per month before I completely cancelled it, although it did piggyback on my $40 Internet service.

Ok so a bunch of community access channels (broadcasting things like council meetings, school board meetings and other local events) in various parts of Vermont want this stuff from Comcast.

What do the voters (those who voted for the Vermont legislature and those who voted for elected officials in areas where these community access stations exist) want? Is there actually pressure from the electorate (or from the people who are running these community access stations or the elected politicians) for this stuf

I find it interesting that Comcast feels that it has Constitutional rights as a company. There's two pieces to that. They're a corporation - not a person. Vermont is also only requiring these changes within their state so even the commerce clause doesn't apply if Comcast wanted to stretch it that far.

These requirements aren't unreasonable. Build out the network like they're supposed to do anyway, add the public access content to the online guide like they do in other states, provide for live transmission when it's practical, and be a part of a proceeding to determine if public access content should be broadcast in HD.

This has no impact on their carrier status. It actually fits right in with it. They're being told that they have to open their network to content. Vermont isn't asking for anything that hasn't been done in other states. There's no actual burden on Comcast except for having restrictions tied to their license.

As at least one other commentor has said - if they don't like it they can decline the license and let another cable operator take over their monopoly. Or withdraw and let the municipalities manage their own infrastructure. But this is the cost of doing business and they need to suck it up or leave.

Commerce Clause could definitely apply, at least in so far as it has been applied in other cases. There is precedent in some case regarding a farmer growing grain to feed his own livestock. Some federal agency successfully argued in court that because his grain supplanted grain he would otherwise purchase, which might potentially come from out of state or be exported to another state, that the commerce clause applied. The Commerce Clause is so incredibly broadly interpreted that I would bet a skilled lawyer

You are probably referring to Wickard v. Filburn. That was one of the most insanely idiotic court decisions ever. It effectively ended any constitutional restrictions on the federal government's economic power, thereby opening it up for sale to the highest bidder.

Corporations are collections of people which are treated as a person going back to British common law.

You sort of have had an argument, if you understood what you were talking about. Corporations do not exist in common law. They have always been creations by charter from an executive body - monarch or legislature - which are outside of common law. But the personhood of a corporation was always a limited legal fiction for the purposes of transacting business under their charter. It was only in the 1890s that businesses could start incorporating essentially at will, and it was only in the last 20 years in the

I'm looking from the outside in on this since I don't live in Vermont. On the face of it the requirement seems unfair. Why is Comcast the only provider being required to do this? Is Vermont requiring any other video delivery service that operates in the state to do this? Since I didn't see anything in the article about it I'm going to assume the answer is no. So Comcast has to incur additional costs while other video providers don't. The government (at any level) shouldn't pick winners and losers.

Because Comcast is the only provider in VT. They have a monopoly. And just signed an 11 year extension to that monopoly. They're very upset that in exchange for having complete control over the TV and Internet in VT (aside from OTA and wireless) that they are being required to provide an adequate level of service.

The requirement to have public access channels is a federal mandate. Cable companies see this as yet another cost to control, so they're still running on 1990s analog technology to produce them. Th

Because Comcast is the only provider in VT. They have a monopoly. And just signed an 11 year extension to that monopoly. They're very upset that in exchange for having complete control over the TV and Internet in VT (aside from OTA and wireless) that they are being required to provide an adequate level of service.

The requirement to have public access channels is a federal mandate. Cable companies see this as yet another cost to control, so they're still running on 1990s analog technology to produce them. They're not going to modernize and digitize the public access channels until the FCC tells them they have to. Or strips that requirement from the law, which I bet the cable companies would prefer.

VT has said, "We're giving you a monopoly, and these are the terms." Comcast doesn't like those terms, so instead of not signing that contract extension, they signed it and then sued.

So yeah, they're the same old pieces of shit they've always been.

That's not entirely true. Residents of Vermont can also use Dish, DirecTV, PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, etc... Comcast has a government-sanctioned monopoly on traditional cable service, but I would bet that more residents get their video service from other providers. Vermont should require all video delivery services to do it, or none at all.

My point is that the government shouldn't be allowed to pick winners and losers. There are multiple types of video providers, but they are all treated differently. That shouldn't happen.

I'm not defending Comcast. I don't have their service and I've never worked for them or any of their counterparts. It also seems that suing after signing a contract is standard. The plaintiff can show real world examples of real world hardships vs hypotheticals.

Tell Comcast its services are no longer required and Vermont will follow the Chattanooga model and supply everyone 10 gigabits to the home. After all, if it's that expensive, Vermont can't do it for less and therefore can't compete with Comcast, right? But if Vermont can do it, why waste time on a bunch of losers?

Did the state of Vermont hold an open bidding process to provide residents with cable service? If not then residents should sue the state for corruption and force the state to allow other companies the chance to bid on offering cable service.

"In a lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Burlington, Comcast argued that the PUC "exceeded its authority under federal and Vermont law" by imposing "numerous conditions on Comcast's continued cable operations in the state that are arbitrary, unprecedented and will ultimately harm local cable subscribers by resulting in millions of dollars in increased cable costs." It said the commission "did so despite overwhelming record evidence that Vermont cable subscribers do not want to incur any addition

Because Comcast sells their internet with TV bundles at a cheaper rate than standalone internet.

All you need to do to fix that is require that companies much lease the last mile(pole to the home) like we do up here in Canada. Internet suddenly gets cheaper, and the market gets very competitive. It also doesn't stop those small companies from dropping their own fiber, DSLAMs or cable plants either.

If I added on TV, my bill would be higher, but cheaper than buying each separately.

So it's more like:

Internet : $125TV: $50Internet and TV: $150

My other option is uverse, I tried that, 1/3 the speed is all they offer and that's at 3/4 the price. It was down weekly and their mandatory router/modem is garbage. Comcast is the best internet service we can have. It's stable, I can bring my own modem, its' fast (always at least 6

If Comcast techs are out installing live remote feeds for every town council meeting, they aren't fixing the glitchy signal at your house. Alternatively, they hire more techs and buy more trucks, which cost money. That money isn't going to magically appear, the company gets its money from the customers.

It costs very roughly $20,000 / mile to install new buried cables. If Comcast is required to put in 550 miles of new lines, that'll cost about $11 million and that money isn't going to magically appear from

Perhaps only pay $389 million rather then $400 million for the stadium naming rights? All over N. America the communications companies seem to have endless money for advertising but no money for customer support or expanding infrastructure.

According to https://www.highspeedinternet.... [highspeedinternet.com] , 92% of Vermont residents have DSL available, 78% have cable. The largest provider in the state is FairPoint. Xfinity and Spectrum sell cable internet there.

It is pretty general. The State is probably split up in such a way that any given area has one to two options and looking at that page, most of those options are pretty crappy for 2018. 3Mbps is pretty low and the minimum that my government is aiming for in the high arctic.

I don't know, it *might* be split up, but Vermont is only half a million people. Less than where I live, North Dallas. Here, our suburbs aren't divided into different zones for different ISPs, each ISP covers 8 million people or so. I guess neither of us knows the situation in Vermont.

They don't need to provide "live feeds" the state, local governments can do that for the price of a video camera and someone to operate it. However, they should be required to put it on their network. They can do this quite easily at virtually no cost, simply via software.

That might be a reasonable alternative in many cases, to route the video over the internet from wherever it is, to the cable TV facilities. If the venue has high-speed internet that is RELIABLY cable of broadcast quality HD, even when many people are there using it for wifi, of course.

The current demand from the PUC is that if Comcast has (TV) cabling within X distance of the event, they have to roll a remote TV broadcast unit to the event. Obviously that provides better picture quality than most internet

Because Comcast doesn't have a right to run a business there without regulations. It's a privilege. Moreover, Comcast is attempting to speak for citizen,s which is most certainly does not, and those statements should be rejected out of hand.

Some day, a cable company is going to run into a really, really good judge that eviscerates its basic premises. That will be a fine day indeed.

If you pay as much as I do for Comcast service ($250/month), the day they break up Comcast's government permitted monopoly will indeed be a great day.

We have to keep in mind that like other cable operators, Comcast is essentially a monopoly in the communities that they serve. This being the case, local and state governments have every right to regulate them and impose conditions on their operation. Indeed, indirectly as a taxpayer I provide them access to public right-aways, so I expect that I should get

I doubt that, it sounds about $100 too high. Initial discount is always reset with a phone call, I doubt the OP wouldn't know that. OP is probably paying for several premium channel tiers including a sports package.

Cut your TV addiction or at least go to your local library. Mine has more movies and complete TV series available than I ever saw in a Blockbuster.

Talk about damning with faint praise! Blockbuster always had a horrible selection. Any local video store was always better than Blockbuster. Given their poor selection and their customer-hostile policies (which drove me away and got them on the losing end of a class-action lawsuit), it's hard to explain the rise of Blockbuster in the first place. It sure wasn't due to quality.

Evidently, you don't want to know how your government works, but I do. Those who are left in the dark are taken advantage of by an army of corporate lobbyists and lawyers constantly advancing corporate (and increasingly foreign) interests in the background, usually with limited public knowledge or opportunity for input. Currently, the cable monopolies pick and choose what government operations they choose to cover and make every effort to make it as boring and uninformative as possible so that they can av

Because Cable Companies run as psuto-monopolies. Where they operate in a particular area without much competition.I live in Charter/Spectrum Territory. Comcast operates less then a few miles away from my home. However me as an individual cannot switch to Comcast or the people who live a few miles away in the next state can switch to Spectrum.

My options are limited.Discontinue Cable (where I will have No High speed internet access) and limited TV services (too much tree coverage for satellite)Do deal with what I have.

Because Spectrum owns the cable and the miles of infrastructure. I am as an individual is mostly powerless. However we have these things called governments, where I and other members of my community can vote on who can make rules and encourage them my issues. Where they can act as an overall control on such a company where otherwise I would be powerless to do anything about.

Internet and phone service, needed communications infrastructure, qualifies for classification as a utility.

This said, your phone as a tethering device to the the Internet qualifies as an alternative, and you excluded it. Entertainment (TV) doesn't elevate cable companies to a utility, rather, communications do. Entertainment isn't life and death. Not being able to call 911 is life and death.

In a more perfect world, the communities would own the poles and the wire

He also said: "In a more perfect world, the communities would own the poles and the wires and the easements, and you could pick Comcast, Spectrum, or whomever to be your provider, as a few communities now offer."

They may "own" the wires, but they don't own the right-away. Its time to make them pay more for the right-away. It's time to require that any digging or wiring along a public right-away must add a separate cable to be used by a potential competive cable company that would purchase the cable at a minimum price of 110% of its cost at the time the cable was laid. That way future entrants can enter the market and the original company is guaranteed a minimum of a 10% investment on the cable being laid.

Other successful models say: easements and right-of-ways can become either municipally-owned, perhaps maintained, and so long as you keep things tidy, the wires, preferably fiber, are for all via varying distribution methodologies.

4G in many areas is great. Yes, there are lots of areas where it doesn't but they tend to favorably map where cable systems are lain, because of the population densities. Rural service, well, that's still a problem.

There are certainly gaps. Having a somewhat homogeneous "4G" or "5G" infrastructure is still another problem, although it's still my contention that the data communications portion of cable infrastructure is a utility, and deserves what was once Title II status to make it a regulated utility.

Cell phone internet works well in many areas... except for the severe data limits. 25 or 50 GB of data per month simply doesn't cut it in the modern landscape. My house (multiple adults) uses over a TERABYTE of data each month.

The cellular infrastructure isn't designed to let a significant number of people use that much data. Short of building cells on every street corner there is no way that it could be. Using that much data under current day cell contracts would cost a horrendous amount of money.

Take away government and Comcast has the right to sell whatever they want. They would not have the right to put any cables under the ground outside their own property, though. So Comcast has gotten benefits from the government. Why should those benefits come without any cost?

By federal law, cable franchises are nonexclusive. So a slight correction: Utilities are granted rights of way to pull layer 1 (fiber or copper) "in exchange for having to maintain stipulated service standards."

Perhaps one thing that may make a cable franchise appear exclusive is a regulator requiring a buildout schedule that is prohibitively rapid for a franchisee with less capital, even if the prospective franchisee agrees to include a mix of high- and low-income neighborhoods in each stage of buildout.

Why in the hell would Vermont even have the authority to "license" a corporation to exist

Vermont is perfectly within it's rights to demand certain conditions to any cable company's operation within it's borders.

Corporate charters are granted by, yup, the government. Their very existence is allowed and controlled by the government, and (recent Supreme Court rulings equating them to people notwithstanding) have regulations that stipulate how and where they may operate. Without government regulation a corporation becomes nothing more than a group of people working towards a common goal, but with

Comcast is negotiating for the right to use public right of ways and for a monopoly on services. It's perfectly acceptable for Vermont to put conditions on the contract. If Comcast doesn't like it, they can try to negotiate individually with thousands of property owners and try to compete with others.

I hate Comcast, but in this case, they are right. Why in the hell would Vermont even have the authority to "license" a corporation to exist, not to mention dictate how it must grow it's business and get a bunch of free kickbacks on those government entities?

For a corporation to exist within the boundaries of the USA, it has to be registered with a state's Secretary of State first. That's where the regulation begins, not ends.

I hate Comcast, but in this case, they are right. Why in the hell would Vermont even have the authority to "license" a corporation to exist, not to mention dictate how it must grow it's business and get a bunch of free kickbacks on those government entities?

Because Vermont is a sovereign state and can do what it wants as long as it's not in violation of federal law?

Comcast petitions to exist. All corporations exist at the pleasure of the government.

Comcast requests use of government easements for their use.

Comcast provides a service that has been deemed a "utility" and is regulated as such.

Comcast demands more of the government than the government demands of it. But when conditions are applied, they are free to close shop and move elsewhere. They refuse. They want to take and take, but never give.

Because Comcast isn't merely a "business". It's a government-supported monopoly.The license to operate as such comes with various stipulations, which Comcast will always try (as hard as possible) to weasel out of.

Why in the hell would Vermont even have the authority to "license" a corporation to exist, not to mention dictate how it must grow it's business and get a bunch of free kickbacks on those government entities?

Cables (and pipes) are strung up through public easements [wikipedia.org]. These are access rights the government has to send "essential" wires, cables, and pipes through private property. Without these easements, any utility company would have to negotiate with thousands if not millions of private property owners i

Wired telecommunications is not a free market. The cost of putting in the infrastructure is large and there are considerable economies of scale, so any market will have a very small number of providers; one in many cases. Because of that, government regulation to protect public interests is necessary.

Just because everyone who provides internet is classified as a utility until the recent flipflop by the FCC, nullifying the Title II classification they were under. That can always be restored by the entity or by law.

but with Trump now at the helm we have recognized as a country that it is counter-productive to pass job-killing legislation that subverts the free market and tries to pick winners and losers in the private sector